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Thursday, March 29, 2012

Who's That Kid with the Oreo Cookie?

I still remember every word to that jingle. There was even hand motions, a clap sequence of sorts, that went along with it. I remember us girls singing and clapping on the playground during recess. Ah ... memories.

Needless to say, Oreo has set up permanent shop in my life, and not just next to a tall glass of milk. It's a classic cookie, like chocolate chip, that never goes out of style or wears out its welcome. It's reinvented itself over the years -- 100 years, to be exact -- too. There's regular, double-stuffed, and vanilla. There are football shaped ones, which I buy for the first Giants game of the season. And the color of the filling will even change for the holidays.

But one thing that you don't see on the shelves of your supermarket is chocolate-covered Oreos.

A friend of my mom's had some. And one way or another, my sister ended up trying them. And she fell in love. Occasionally these delectable treats would find their way from my mom's friend to my sister, but it was a waiting game. She never knew when they would reappear. So my sister decided to take the bull by the horns, and asked me if we could make our own chocolate-covered Oreos during a Saturday visit in February.

Now I had done a little bit of research before this venture. Some used semi-sweet chocolate; some use milk chocolate. But all the experiences I read about had used regular Oreos and molds to make them. But my sister and I decided to skip the molds and just drop the Oreos -- the double-stuffed Oreos -- directly into the double boiler.

So that's exactly what we did. And here's what we learned:

When using double-stuffed Oreos, one 12 oz. bag of chocolate chips is not enough. You need at least a bag and a half.

The cookies dipped in milk chocolate are too sweet. We preferred the ones dipped in semi-sweet chocolate.

While they look pretty with sprinkles on them, it was incredibly messy. Sprinkles all over.

We quickly learned that either because we were using the dipping method, double-stuffed Oreos, or both, we didn't have enough chocolate to cover all of the cookies. What were we to do?

"How about melting the Hershey Kisses?" my husband suggested, handing me the candy dish with the mint Kisses leftover from the holidays.

Quickly my sister, husband, son, and I began unwrapping the candies and dumping them into the double boiler. We had just enough to cover the remaining cookies.

After a flash freeze we were ready to taste the cookies. And while we had been looking forward to trying the plain chocolate-covered ones, we all opted to try one that had been dipped in mint chocolate instead.

Score!

These were an unbelievable hit, and by far my favorite. They were special too. They had the flavor reminiscent of the Girl Scouts Thin Mint cookies, but were better because of the added bonus of the Oreo filling. Our Oreo adventure took an unexpected turn that day.

They say necessity is the mother of invention, and we definitely stumbled upon a surprising and wonderful treat that fateful Saturday in February.